Category: The Internet

Enjoying pointless endeavors like encouraging the correct use of language and finding fault with years-old internet video essays

For various reasons — including, no doubt, sins I committed in previous lifetimes — I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube lately. I wonder if it’s fundamentally changed my temperament: a year or so ago I would’ve thought it was ridiculous to spend time watching other people go to theme parks or play video games. Now, I still think it’s completely ridiculous, but it’s also quite pleasant.

It also means that I end up watching a lot of video essays and end up forming really strong opinions about inconsequential topics. (The whole world of “video responses” used to be bafflingly alien to me, but now I kind of get why you’d want to set up a camera and lighting to explain exactly how someone else was wrong).

Other times, though, they hit closer to home. They violate everything that we civilized people hold to be good and true, such as Tom Scott’s outrageous claim that the difference between “less” and “fewer” is purely pedantic.

For the record: I do get the irony in writing an essay to explain how I’m not actually pedantic. But this one especially bugs me because:

I’m constantly hearing it called “pedantic”

Without fail, everyone who calls it “pedantic” goes on to hypocritically complain about something even more pedantic

Technically, a list should always contain at least three items

I’ve heard the complaint from no fewer than a dozen people over the years, and from no less than Stephen Fry himself. Scott claims that it’s a prescriptive distinction; it’s an assertion of how people should speak instead of an observation of how they actually speak. The idea is supposedly that for those of us who think it sounds wrong enough to be jarring, we’re making the distinction just so that we can feel superior, even though the meaning is perfectly clear either way.

But there is an actual distinction between the two, even though Scott’s video calls the distinction “dodgy” and relegates it to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it footnote. “Fewer” is used for things you can count; “less” is used for more generalized or indistinct things or concepts. Or in other words, “fewer” relates to “number,” while “less” relates to “amount.” (And yeah, it’s jarring to me when people say stuff like “a smaller amount of people,” too).

Everyone can decide for herself whether it’s a big enough distinction to care about, but it’d be disingenuous to say that there’s no distinction. I’m definitely not an authority in linguistics, but I do know that the Japanese language has different counting words for cylindrical objects, flat objects, abstract concepts, and so on. The video that made me discover Tom Scott’s channel in the first place was this one about “language features” such as that, and the importance of preserving endangered languages, since they sometimes have concepts and ways of thinking of and expressing concepts that don’t exist in other languages.

I agree with that part. It’s why, for one example, I started writing “everyone can decide for herself” after years of dismissing it as arbitrary political correctness. Since the “feature” that English lacks is a truly gender-neutral singular pronoun, using “she” is no more or less correct than using “he.” (It is more correct than “they,” because if we’re going to stop caring about subject-verb agreement then we might as well just go back to banging rocks together and grunting). But the whole argument is that language is about more than just being “correct;” it’s about expressiveness, and choosing “he” as the arbitrary default expresses assumptions about what’s normal and what’s an exception. It’s rarely intentional expression, but it’s still there, whether or not you choose to spell it “womyn.”

Obviously, “can I count it?” is a much less charged and much less important question than “can I systematically oppress it?” but it’s still a concept that we can express in English. It seems hypocritical to spend an entire video defending all the nuances and connotations that languages can express, and then spend another video insisting that two words in English are interchangeable and anyone who says otherwise is a pompous know-it-all.

One of my favorite podcasters is Helen Zaltzman, of The Allusionist and Answer Me This. She’s made the assertion that the difference between “less” and “fewer” is purely pedantic. But she’s also said several times that her pet peeve is when people say “and I” instead of “and me,” and vice-versa; as in, “The rings of power were given to Galadriel and I.” It sounds jarring to me, too, but ultimately that is a purely prescriptive distinction. Whether a word’s the subject or object of a sentence or clause is purely a grammatical rule, and it doesn’t change the meaning or make it any more difficult to understand.

Above anything else, though, I think the key thing to realize is that I need to watch less YouTube. Or if you prefer, I need to watch fewer video essays. If nothing else, it’d save me the cognitive dissonance of watching this video of the Nerdwriter bitching about how selfies and pictures of food are ruining Instagram by turning it into a gross platform for personal branding (an allegation I take personally!), and then seeing his Instagram feed filled with photos of himself eating food in Venice with his girlfriend. Maybe the key thing to realize is that people writing blog posts and making videos online need to be a hell of a lot less judgmental.

Reports from an alternate timeline where the sky’s the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.

Like everybody else in the US, I saw the story about a man being beaten and dragged off a United Airlines flight for refusing to “volunteer” the seat he’d paid for. Seeing friends’ reactions to it on Facebook beat and dragged me just far enough out of my white middle-class bubble to realize that yes, it’s almost definitely the case that the man’s ethnicity played a factor in how far it was allowed to escalate. Fortunately for you, the reader, it didn’t drag me far enough out of my white middle-class bubble to convince me that the internet wasn’t interested in hearing my opinion about it.

When I saw the video that had been recorded and broadcast by a passenger on the plane, I was sitting in San Francisco at my job writing social media software for mobile supercomputers. I watched the video on my touchscreen-enabled internet-connected tablet computer, playing in a window on the screen around the comments coming in live from viewers around the country, next to a sidebar describing how the reality TV celebrity who was now the President of the United States had authorized military theater missile strikes on another country without Congress’s permission.

And in response to one of the most viscerally blatant abuses of power against a person in an objectively, grossly unfair situation, reaction was mixed. Outrage against United Airlines was running neck and neck with assertions that the real problem is the guy didn’t do what he was told.

It was at that point when I realized son of a bitch, I’m living in a shitty 1990s corporate-run future dystopia.

I spent years making fun of those things as being hackneyed and adolescent. I rejected anti-corporate paranoia as sophomoric, literally — the kind of thing that college students choose as My First Liberal Outrage Experience on their way to becoming truly Woke. Now here I am just one cybernetic implant away from living it.

What’s especially magical about the United Airlines incident is how it combines so many 21st Century United States attitudes into one thoroughly unproductive and distressing conversation. There’s absolutely a streak of the “Conform! Embrace the police state!” types, but it’s at least tempered with — if not actually overwhelmed by — the kind of lazy, cynical, apathy that pervades everything in 2017. Even cheering the Chicago PD for beating up a guy would be taking too strong a stand. Instead, you get more of the “Well, actually, FAA regulations state that…” contingent.

They’re not defending United, oh no. They just want to make it clear that it’s not as simple as you’re making it sound. There are just so many shades of gray to the issue of a corporation requesting the physical assault of a civilian for not peacefully complying with the fact that they’re denying him the service that he paid for.

(And yeah, I will go to the easy comparison: it’s the same thing you heard a lot of before and after the election. People kept insisting that they’re not necessarily a supporter of Trump, but then would go on to defend one of the hundreds of completely reprehensible and un-American policies he proposed during his campaign. “Look, I’m no fan of the man who openly mocked a disabled reporter during a campaign speech, I just believe in common sense immigration reform, like a multi-billion dollar wall between two peaceful trading partners.”)

So now I’m in the biofuel-powered hoverboat of someone who knows enough about crappy 90s dystopian sci-fi to be able to make fun of it, but not enough to actually live in it. And on the bright side, if we had to pick one thing from the late 80s and early 90s and agree that we were going to make that our future, we could’ve done worse. At least we’re not all living in a global version of that 4 Non Blondes video.

Shallow takes on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” are a perfect example of faux-progressive pop cultural simplification for the Twitter generation

It’s December, which means it’s time for one of the Internet’s most cherished traditions: writing insipid and uninspired analyses of how the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is creepy and “rapey” (to use Key & Peele’s assessment).

Key & Peele’s parody is four years old, and there are plenty that are even older. This year’s is possibly the most vapid and insufferable version to date, as a couple of indie musicians made an acoustic version that’s updated for our modern sensibilities.

I won’t make a comment on the quality of the music itself, except to say that it’s just really twee and awful and I hate it. But most offensive — yes, even more offensive than making a reference to “Pomegranate LaCroix” and thinking it was a witty punchline — is how it attempts to fix all the problematic aspects of the original instead of making an effort to actually understand the original.

The original song — at least the most common version of it — is a back-and-forth between a woman and a man trying to come up with excuses for why she should spend the night. To suggest otherwise robs the woman of any agency and turns her from a modern, self-aware adult into a gullible victim. It also suggests that adults in the 1940s fell into stereotypes and were all either lecherous or prudish, and nobody realized it until the 1970s came along and everybody got woke. In fact, though, the song is a play against those exact same stereotypes.

What makes me so sure that interpretation is the correct one? Well, if there’s one thing The Young People Today love more than overly simplistic gender swaps and song parodies, it’s a bunch of stuff presented in list format. So here’s Eight Reasons Why A More Sophisticated Comprehension of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is Everything In The World Right Now:

The song was performed by a married couple at parties. For years I’d assumed it had been written for Neptune’s Daughter, but it was actually a duet that writer Frank Loesser performed with his wife. So it’s not the stereotype of the cigar-chomping MGM exec who directs a gullible ingenue to the casting couch; it’s the stereotype of The Thin Man-style sophisticates having dinner parties in which they make fun of less-sophisticated stereotypes like playboy and “good girl.”

It’s a duet. In the MPR write-up linked above, the writer describes the song as “like the ‘Blurred Lines’ of the holiday songbook.” It’s not for dozens of reasons, the most obvious being that the woman in “Baby It’s Cold Outside” has a voice, instead of just being “the hottest bitch in this room.”

It’s a call-and-response. In addition to being a duet, it’s a back-and-forth between two adults. You have to listen to both sides to get it, and you have to listen to how both participants play off each other before singing in unison at the end of each verse. If Liza and Lemanski wanted to “improve” on the song, then in addition to actually making an effort to sing on key, they should’ve chosen to end the song abruptly after she says “I’ve got to go away.” If you’re making a point about consent, then actually make the point.

The woman’s objections are all about keeping up appearances. She never talks about what she wants to do, but instead about what she should do. It’s about her mother worrying, her father being angry, what the neighbors will think, her sister and brother’s suspicions, the kind of gossip she’ll be subjected to. “There’s bound to be talk tomorrow, at least there will be plenty implied.”

The woman is totally into it. “Maybe just a half a drink more.” “I wish I knew how to break this spell.” “I ought to say no no no, sir, At least I’m going to say that I tried.” “The welcome has been so nice and warm.” She’s looking for excuses to stay, and playfully looking for a way to spend the night while still preserving her reputation. She’s talking herself into it just as much as she’s arguing against the man. At the end of each verse, they come together because they’ve agreed on the story they can tell people the next day: she had to spend the night.

Esther Williams is the star of Neptune’s Daughter. Her character isn’t being taken advantage of or fooled by anyone. She’s perfectly aware that Ricardo Montalban’s character is a “playboy.”

The gender-swapped version makes fun of all the stereotypes in play. The version of the song with Betty Garrett as the “wolf” and Red Skelton as the “mouse” is played as a farcical take on the more wry and sophisticated one, and that fact alone shows which stereotypes they were making fun of. When Garrett is portrayed as being “man-crazy” and Skelton as flustered, it’s supposed to be funny because women aren’t “supposed” to be eager for sex and men aren’t supposed to shy away from it. When Skelton does the absurd Spanish accent, it pokes fun of the image of Montalban as a sexy Spanish lothario.

Viva Las Vegas has the clumsy and obvious version. Don’t get me wrong: if I had to go back and live in a movie fantasy version of the past, I’d totally choose the universe of Elvis movies over 1940s romantic comedies. But the duet “The Lady Loves Me” between Elvis and Ann-Margaret is another perfect example of what would happen if you took the same basic setup as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and removed all the wit and subtlety from it. The two characters are simply arguing, and there’s nothing clever or coy about the woman’s rejections. She’s just parading around for the audience in a bathing suit while getting off on the attention. The “the gentleman’s all wet” bit at the end is presumably a 1964 take on “Grrl Power” that doesn’t actually say or do anything positive.

It’s pretty arrogant to insist that “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is supposed to be read exactly as it appears on the surface. In the song, adults could make a wry comment on the idea that “good girls don’t” and that men were perpetually horny aggressors taking advantage of innocent women. Today’s simplistic and reductive hot takes on the song act as if that idea were actually the common belief at the time, and most Americans from 1930-1960 actually did live according to the Hayes Code and network TV standards and practices. Basically, you’ve grown to believe the false version and become skeptical of the real one. (For the record, people didn’t live in black and white before 1950, either).

Okay, so why make an issue of it?

Usually this would warrant about as much concern as worrying about whether Alanis Morissette understands the idiomatic use of “ironic.” It’s well intentioned and at worst harmless, right? Why not remind people about the importance of consent? And isn’t it good to remind guys that they have a responsibility to listen to and respect the people they’re with, and not try to wear them down?

Sure it is, but the problem is that over-simplifications are polarizing. When you find yourself spending years asserting something that’s trivially true — and being rewarded as if you’re making a bold statement — then you gradually chip away at the idea that it’s trivially true. You open the discussion to the idea that the things that are true are in fact somehow controversial, or at least topics about which reasonable people can disagree.

The fact that’s incontrovertibly true about all this is that consent is essential. Only an idiot or a monster would consider that controversial. Idiots and monsters don’t deserve to be part of the conversation, but asserting the shallow and superficial take on an important issue (even if it’s correct) is inviting bullshit to be presented as if it were a reasonable counter-argument.

Reducing everybody who’s performed or enjoyed “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for the past 70 years to a clueless, sexist stereotype isn’t progressive. It sets an unacceptably low bar for what constitutes progress.

Navigating the minefield of principled opinions that results when wealthy strangers sue each other.

As an indication of how plugged into the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship I am: I’d never heard of Peter Thiel before around 50% of my Twitter feed suddenly started making repeated references to him. That alone isn’t noteworthy, but it is unusual to find myself disagreeing with practically everyone about an issue.

The short version, as far as I’ve been able to tell: the financially devastating lawsuit that Hulk Hogan recently won against Gawker media was secretly financed by Thiel, an absurdly wealthy investor. His motivation for backing the suit, supposedly, was a long-standing vendetta against Gawker for an old piece in Valleywag that outed Thiel as gay. (Apparently, he’s now openly out of the closet, so I’m not hypocritically spreading rumors here).

We’re told by people that I generally agree with, and also John Gruber, that this is a case with chilling implications for every one of us who’s not super-wealthy. TPM warns us that it’s horrifying when a “bully plutocrat” can take advantage of the American judicial system to obliterate journalists he doesn’t like. The Wired piece I linked to at the top suggests a future in which sites can only publish what the wealthy want to hear about themselves. On The Atlantic, Ian Bogost compares Thiel simultaneously to a Bond villain and an internet troll.

(Bogost’s article acknowledges that there are no “good guys” in a story involving Gawker, Hulk Hogan, and a billionaire with a vendetta against a blogging empire, but it also highlights and hyper-links “Trump-supporting” twice when describing Thiel, so it’s kind of easy to see who’s the real villain here).

I’m a little torn. I’m a decidedly non-wealthy person with zero influence in Silicon Valley, and I tend to say “libertarian” and “Trump-supporter” with the same sneering disdain that Ann Coulter uses to talk about “liberals.” I’m also a gay man who spent a lot of years in the closet, and I’m particularly appalled by how Gawker created an environment of muckraking disingenuously disguised as progressivism: having it both ways by treating homosexuality as money-making scandal, and then trying to rationalize it by claiming that they’re doing it to expose hypocrisy or promote visibility or dismantle the heteronormative patriarchy or some such bullshit.

Of course I care about free speech and freedom of the press. Yes, I think the American justice system has been corrupted to be a travesty of “justice,” where the outcome rarely has as much to do with what’s fair as it does with who has the most money. I’m appalled at the idea of a racist, fascist clown taking power of the country, and the creation of an American class of people with such stratospheric wealth that their concerns are completely removed from the rest of the population.

But this story has made me realize one thing: More than any of that, the thing I care most about is a good dramatic arc. Gawker media getting wiped out by a no-longer relevant professional wrestler who starred in No Holds Barred and an adulterous sex tape — that’s just a weird, sleazy story. But Gawker media getting taken down for writing a sleazy non-journalistic gossip item outing a billionaire against his will? That is straight-up delightful cosmic justice.

At the time, that piece of lovingly crafted artisanal comedy got exactly the amount of attention it deserved, which was almost none. I’ve been making dad jokes since before I turned gray, so I’m intimately familiar with having friends and loved ones roll their eyes and go on about their business.

Last night, surprisingly, it got retweeted by somebody asking “are you kidding me right now?” I responded that yeah I was kidding, I’d thought it was obvious; I got a polite “sorry” that was appreciated but completely unnecessary; that was the end of that.

But then I saw another retweet, and then another, and another, all of them saying some variant of “is this guy for real smh” or “lmao” some such. No big deal. Then I noticed that one of them exclaimed “FOUND IT,” which seemed weird, like it was part of an ongoing conversation. What was going on?

As it turns out, this was going on: a piece of investigative journalism on Buzzfeed mocking all the clueless racist people on Twitter and Facebook complaining about The Wiz. (Which, in a completely fortuitous coincidence for Buzzfeed’s site traffic, is airing live on NBC tonight).

As I said on Twitter, I’m not sure what aspect of that post bugs me more: the attempt to stir up a controversy, or the assumption that a gay man in his 40s would have never heard of The Wizard of Oz, or that one who grew up in the 70s had never heard of The Wiz.

If I’m honest, though, what hurts the most is the last bit, where he says my dumb joke is one that was already done on Glee. Manufacturing outrage for page views is one thing, but using screengrabs of Kristin Chenoweth in order to call me derivative is just cruel.

I won’t be even more derivative by going into a long explanation of why I think the outrage-as-engagement content mills are awful, because it’s already been covered elsewhere. There’s an entire site brilliantly parodying it (Wow). And a writer named Parker Molloy wrote “5 Things the Media Does to Manufacture Outrage”, which explains it as clearly as anything I’ve ever seen. (And is written in Buzzfeed format, which I’m assuming was a clever stylistic choice even if it wasn’t).

Here’s the thing, though: the “writer” of that Buzzfeed post blurred out photos and names — which I guess is at least something positive, or there’d be even more nonsense coming my way — but it’s still super-easy to find stuff just by searching for the body of the message. Computers, and all that. So I searched for the other ones. I only found two others, but it was immediately obvious that they were both corny jokes, too. It’s not even painstaking research, either. 90% of the time you can tell who’s a troll, who’s a batshit extremist, and who’s just making goofy jokes within 15 seconds of reading a twitter feed. It took Buzzfeed longer to blur the profile photos than it would’ve taken to do a quick scan for context.

But nobody bothers to scan for context, so it’s been a day of getting notifications of people calling me an asshole or an idiot. To be clear: it’s just been a couple dozen retweets and one cartoonishly overwrought jerk trying to pick a fight, which barely even registers on the scale of internet harassment. I am white and male after all, so I didn’t have anybody calling me fat or mocking my religion or ethnicity. Still, for somebody who gets about four or five notifications a day, it’s been a drag.

And it’s the laziness of the whole thing that gets me. Sure, making a corny and obvious joke is lazy, but short, ephemeral bits of nonsense are what Twitter’s for. It’s the laziness of serving up “content” that’s just a twitter search for a bunch of seemingly inflammatory tweets interspersed with TV show GIFs and sarcastic comments. The laziness of acting as if that’s really getting a handle on the cultural zeitgeist and making some kind of statement about social justice. The laziness of retweeting something without even taking a few seconds to look for context. The laziness of immediately assuming that people are impossibly crass, selfish, and stupid, so of course you’re going to give them a 140-characters-or-less piece of your mind. Just the willful incuriousness of not wanting to find out more about the thing you’re angrily responding to.

Of course, I do it too. I’ve been trying to do a better job of vetting stuff before I send it along, instead of just sharing and retweeting everything I see that pisses me off. But I’m still frequently happy to dive headfirst into the gears of the outrage machine, shaking my tiny fist at whatever the Blogging Illuminati have decided is to be the Controversy of the Week.

And why not? Companies have spent millions and millions of dollars to make it so easy. Reading stuff is a chore, but it just takes a fraction of a second to hit the RT or Share button. These days, they even serve up a convenient menu of stuff to be angry about. “That mostly forgotten actor from the 80s said what?! This aggression will not stand!” Engagement. Content. People may just be saying vapid, mean-spirited, insight-free nonsense, but that’s okay as long as they’re saying something.

I’m starting to think I had a better handle on it years ago, before I “learned” why Internet Activism is Important. I used to think it was futile to pull out the pitchforks and torches every time someone said something inflammatory on the internet. But over time, I was reassured that it was bringing about real social change.

Instead, though, it’s just created an environment where people treat the most vapid statements as if they were profound declarations. I’m taking a stand against hate! While I’m sure that’s a blow to the pro-hate lobby, it’s not actually doing anything.

And you don’t have to be a statistician to understand that a bunch of randos spewing shit on Twitter isn’t a representative sample of anything. Even if that Buzzfeed “story” weren’t weighted with corny liberals making clumsy attempts at satire, and it were in fact a bunch of clueless racists spewing toxic nonsense on social media… really, so what? Do you really want to amplify that crap, to act like it’s something that intelligent people should waste their time responding to?

It’s not a case of ignoring something pernicious, just hoping it’ll go away. And it’s absolutely not a case of ignoring harassment and pretending it doesn’t exist. It is recognizing the difference between meaningful engagement, and just looking for something to get pissed off about. Which is worse than a waste of time, because it gives a voice to ideas and opinions that don’t deserve it. Keep doing it long enough, and you create an environment where even the most basic human respect — like, say, not harassing women or people of a different religion — gets treated as if it were a controversial topic on which reasonable adults can disagree.

It used to be that I’d see people committing themselves to “think positive” or “promote good” or “be the change you want to see in the world” and think that they were being impossibly naive and sheltered. You can’t just ignore injustice! You’ve got to root it out, and fight it! But that just puts you in the mindset of always looking for a fight. And I mean that literally — I confess I’ve absolutely posted stuff on Facebook with the express intent of looking for someone to disagree with me, so I could feel like I’d accomplished something with my righteous conviction. And I’ve spent a depressing amount of time in my life ranting about Mike Huckabee, somebody who has no chance of ever being President or in any kind of influential position, and who just says things to get attention and piss off people like me.

So gradually, I’ve been starting to see the appeal of this whole “positivity” business. If you really want to see an end to bigotry, misogyny, and general awfulness, you could yell at awful people until they stop being awful. Or you could pledge to be as un-awful as possible, and spread that around instead of the nastiness. The latter seems a lot more fun, and a lot less error-prone. Learn to recognize who’s actually influential, and who’s just trying to manipulate people into thinking they’re more influential than they really are.

Having been both the yeller and the yelled-at in Twitter flare-ups, I can tell you that it’s completely unproductive both ways. At the risk of tanking the entire social media economy, I think it makes a lot more sense to just disengage from the outrage machine and spend more time celebrating people doing great things and ignoring the assholes until we starve them of oxygen.

Except for that pharmaceutical CEO guy who jacked up the price of that AIDS drug. He is just the worst.

For a couple of months in 1990, I was completely obsessed with The Sensual World by Kate Bush. It didn’t last for too long before I moved on to be obsessed with The Pogues and the Pixies, and I’d completely forgotten about it until just recently. A few nights ago, YouTube recommended I re-watch Noel Fielding’s brilliant parody of Wuthering Heights, and I had a vague memory that oh yeah, I used to be kind of infatuated with her.

I was trying to remember my favorite song of hers based on a few half-remembered details — what’s that one Kate Bush video where she’s against a black background and flinging gold sparkles everywhere? — and a memory of the chorus but not the actual title Love and Anger. That meant stumbling around all her videos on YouTube trying to find the right one, and coming to a series of conclusions, in roughly this order:

Watching these now is like suddenly remembering vivid details from a dream I had 20 years ago.

Holy crap, Kate Bush is brilliant.

Even if I’d tried, I don’t think I could’ve fully appreciated all this stuff in 1990.

I’d forgotten how different the music industry was back before Napster and the ubiquitous internet.

I never thought much about how important context is to appreciating a work of art.

No really, she’s just the best.

Until I went to college in a city that prides itself on its music, I only listened to whatever was popular at the time. So when MTV started playing that video for Love and Anger and commenting on what a big deal Kate Bush was and how significant it was to be getting a new album, it was all lost on me. To me, she was just “that woman who sang on that Peter Gabriel song.” I had a vague memory of Running Up That Hill, but had just filed it away in the same folder as Bonnie Tyler and Total Eclipse of the Heart: a synthesizer-heavy pop song by someone who was apparently a lot more popular in the UK than in the US. I can’t remember if I was even aware of Wuthering Heights at the time; if so, I almost certainly dismissed it as someone screeching over overly-precious lyrics. Knowing myself at the time, I probably picked up The Sensual World mostly for the cover, thinking that she looked like Jane Wiedlin and sounded like Cyndi Lauper and was probably worth a listen.

Deeper Understanding

The album is a lot more interesting and varied than the pop record I’d been expecting. Rocket’s Tail in particular is fascinating; I don’t believe I’ve heard it in 25 years, but it all came back suddenly as if it’s been looping constantly in the recesses of my brain. I also suddenly remembered why I didn’t become an obsessive fan back then, and it’s two of the most 1990s reasons imaginable.

One is just raw early 90s proto-hipsterism. I thought the song Deeper Understanding‘s story about a man who retreats from human contact into his computer was facile and paranoid, the same way there a lot of stories around the same time talked about virtual reality and rogue AIs but didn’t seem to understand how computers actually worked, and instead panicked about a super-advanced, cold cyber-world that looked like Second Life. I dismissed it as out-of-touch and irrelevant. (And of course, I’m saying that as someone who now wakes up every morning and immediately grabs his cell phone to check on Twitter and Facebook).

The other reason is that doing a “deep dive” on anyone’s work was, at the time, an investment. In 2015, I started digging around YouTube, Wikipedia, and Apple Music, and within a couple of hours had seen and heard 90% of Bush’s artistic output since 1978. It’s hard for me now to imagine a time without YouTube, much less a time before the web and even USENET, even though I was a computer-fixated nerd back when a 300 bps Vicmodem was a novelty. But essentially, in a time without hypertext, I didn’t have much chance to appreciate what I was listening to.

There’s a 2014 documentary from the BBC called The Kate Bush Story that’s a lot better than it would seem on the surface. It’s the typical VH1 format, where a bunch of celebrities gush about Bush’s work intercut with clips from her videos. It seems about as vapid as a Behind the Music or I Love the 80s show, right down to the sour note of ending with Steve Coogan making a pun about “bush.” And they have interviews with the usual suspects, where Elton John and Tori Amos and Neil Gaiman say that they’re huge fans of Kate Bush.

But of course they are, right? I’m not being entirely dismissive; I was an enormous fan of Amos and Gaiman (I wrote Gaiman a fan letter on the GEnie network! And he sent a personal response with a great story about seeing The Pogues in concert!). But even my vague awareness of Kate Bush as “British and feminine and lots of pianos and literary references and scarves and dancing” fits solidly and predictably into the same category as The Sandman and Little Earthquakes.

And speaking of USENET, I was aware even back during those days that there was a pretty substantial fandom around Bush’s music. But even there, it was named after a song that was relatively obscure in the US. So I thought of it in kind of the same way as Doctor Who pre-Russell Davies: super-popular in Britain and good for them! but completely inaccessible to me.

So to watch that documentary and see St. Vincent and Johnny Rotten and Big Boi and Tricky pop up to say how much her work influenced them, it didn’t just grab my attention, but put everything into a context I hadn’t considered before. And made observations that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own, but seem kind of obvious once they’ve been pointed out to me.

Ooh, it gets dark!

For instance, that Noel Fielding parody of Wuthering Heights. I’d seen it years ago, back when my obsession of the moment was The Mighty Boosh. At the time, I hadn’t appreciated that it was a parody of two versions of the video: the iconic one of her dancing in a field wearing a red dress, but also the studio version with its cartwheels and 70s video-trail effects.

I also hadn’t appreciated that it’s not a mocking parody but a reverential one. The joke isn’t about how weird or fey Bush’s performance is in that video, but that she’s the only person who could pull it off without looking silly. And for that matter, what a touchstone the performance was for her fans. (Proof that it’s not mocking but instead a love letter from a fan is that Bush included Fielding in her remake of the Deeper Understanding video that year).

It’s also about how iconic the imagery is, and how indelibly it’s associated with that song. In several of her early interviews, Bush says (paraphrased) that she studied dance, mime, stage production, and eventually, filmmaking, in order to make visual extensions of her songs. To someone raised on MTV and cynicism, that could sound pretentious or disingenuous — videos are promotional material used to sell music, and only inadvertently become artistic works. But then you remember that Bush was doing this before videos were a thing. And you remember how strong the imagery is: I’m about as close to the polar opposite of “waif-like” as a person can get, but I still find it difficult to keep from making the same gesture when I hear the lyric “let me into your window.”

And — even more embarrassingly for me — I hadn’t put any thought into what the song was about. As someone with the perpetual mindset of a teenage boy rolling his eyes at “girls’ stuff” like gothic romances, I hadn’t considered that it was the voice of a dead woman appearing at her lover’s window in the night, pleading to be let inside. So what I’d dismissed as just weird screeching was, of course, completely intentional. For a female songwriter and singer in 1978, The Man with the Child in his Eyes would’ve been a much more accessible debut song. And it would’ve been successful; it’s a beautiful and memorable song that, in my opinion at least, evokes Karen Carpenter’s considerable talent and holds its own. But she deliberately chose her first appearance to be literary and otherworldly.

This Woman’s Work

And she’s done that throughout everything that I’ve seen and heard. Her stuff is clearly influenced by whatever else is going on in music at the time, but there’s a sense that she won’t bother doing anything unless it’s something she finds interesting and unique.

When I first saw the video to Eat the Music from 1993, I thought I’d figured it out: ah, here’s where she went through her World Music phase just like Peter Gabriel and the Talking Heads and pretty much everyone else in the mid 80s through early 90s. But it’s gloriously sinister right from the start, with the lyric “Split me open with devotion, put your hand in and rip my heart out.” As the video goes on, it gets even weirder and more sinister, as the spinning becomes unstoppable, and the other dancer’s eyes roll into the back of his head, and it becomes so frenzied that everyone collapses. What I’d mistaken as a novelty song or a one-off becomes (obviously, in retrospect) a crucial part of a concept album about obsession and loss.

Rubberband Girl from the same album sounds a little like an early 90s Eurythmics song, and the warehouse in which its video was filmed is the same one that supplied the backing bands and ceiling fans for countless other 90s videos. But then there’s that choreography, which suggests that her seemingly effortless grace is actually the result of her being pulled, exhausted and against her will. And then it, too, descends into a kind of frenzy that belies the “bend without breaking” sentiment of the lyrics. She’s bound into a straightjacket and is compelled to wave her arms around, all filmed with the harsh light of a Twin Peaks murder scene.

Apparently, all the videos from The Red Shoes are from a long-form video that featured Miranda Richardson (she has a lot of videos that feature British comedic actors) and one of her early mentors, Lindsay Kemp, which explains the non-sequitur beginnings and endings. Hilariously, in 2005 interview she describes it “a load of bollocks,” while I’m here 10 years later trying to make sense of its bizarre transitions. Removed from that context, Moments of Pleasure is even more fascinating — starting with a whispered soliloquy and then showing nothing but her spinning and tumbling over a series of backdrops. It’s at least as beautiful and powerful a song as This Woman’s Work, but what’s most remarkable to me is how conversational, almost extemporaneous, the lyrics are. It seems like the natural impulse for a song about death and loss would be to make the lyrics flowery and poetic, but having something so prosaic against such a moving orchestration just makes it all the more real.

And speaking of This Woman’s Work, I suspect that the real reason I stopped listening to The Sensual World was that it was too exhausting. Even without the video, it’s hard to hear that song without feeling emotionally drained by the end. Even while cynical early 90s me dismissed as “maudlin” to disguise the fact it never fails to get a sob out of me.

Same with Love and Anger, which I still love but had thought was nothing more than a product of its time with a simple “we’re all in this together!” message. Paying even a little bit of attention to the lyrics shows it to be more sophisticated than that: I think it’s about passion and empathy, expressing even what we think of as negative emotions instead of being repressed and “waiting for a moment that will never happen.”

In an interview around the release of The Sensual World, she said that it was her first album that was written from a feminine perspective, since up until then, all her musical and artistic influences had been men. Which, I think, is selling herself short, since so much of her entire body of work is uniquely feminine. In that BBC documentary, Neil Gaiman calls out the maternal aspects of the songs Breathing and Army Dreamers. The song that Americans around my age were likely most familiar with — Running Up That Hill — is a call for empathy disguised as synth-heavy 80s pop with some terrific choreography. (With the fascinating, slightly sinister twist of making it sound selfish with “let me steal this moment from you now.”)

“It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!”

And then there’s Hounds of Love, which is so good that it kind of makes me angry that attitudes like the one 1990s me had kept it from taking off in the US and so I didn’t get to see and hear it until 2015.

The story I keep reading is that Bush was savvy enough to build on her early success from her first two records, to the point that she was able to free herself from the record label and do everything on her own terms. By the time of Hounds of Love, she was not only writing, singing, and producing her own music, but had built her own studio and conceived of and directed the video to the title track. It’s driving and cinematic and enigmatic, and it’s fantastic in the way that I usually think of Terry Gilliam’s movies as being. (And apparently, she collaborated with Gilliam on the video for Cloudbusting on the same album). In yet another interview, she casually mentions drawing storyboards for the video as if it were no big deal.

One of the reasons I admire St Vincent so much is that she’s able to go all-in on the conceptual art side of her work, and then in “real life” is as personable and down-to-earth as it gets. (Unlike, say, Bjork, who’s brilliant but whom I’d never, ever want to meet in person).

Kate Bush comes across the same way, as a person who pours all her imagination and idiosyncrasies into her work. This results in fantastic things like Sat in Your Lap from The Dreaming, which seems to me as early 80s prog rock as early 80s prog rock gets. And then this wonderful appearance on a British children’s show, where she says she’s lucky because she got to wear roller skates in her video, and she lets a little girl in the audience wear one of the minotaur masks.

It probably goes without saying that Kate Bush is objectively, almost impossibly, beautiful. But even that aspect seems to be something she always treated as incidental — great insofar as it helps the music, but never something that should take away from the music. Experiment IV, for instance, is a sci-fi horror story where she lets a bunch of comedic actors (and her then-partner) take the focus while she takes a bit part as a harpy and a horrible monster.

Most amazing to me is Babooshka from 1980. As with Wuthering Heights, she treats dance as a crucial part of telling the story of the song. She appears both as the scorned wife and as a wild-eyed Valkyrie. The first thing that amazes me about this video is imagining the concept stage: when coming up with ideas of how this alter-ego character would look, evidently Bush saw this piece of art by Chris Achilleos and thought, “Hmm, I bet I could probably pull that off.” The second amazing thing is that she totally does pull it off. And there’s absolutely no hint of pandering and zero sign of the Male Gaze. It has the vibe of an artist completely in control of her work, her appearance, and her sexuality.

Also remarkable to a viewer first seeing it in 2015 is Bush’s interpretation of the song at the time. I doubt it was ever intended to be a “deep” song, but I would’ve taken it as an indictment of the husband for discarding his wife once she was no longer young and beautiful. Bush’s take on it was entirely from the woman’s perspective, though; the husband was mostly incidental but sympathetic. Bush describes the song as being about the wife’s self-doubt and paranoia bringing about her own downfall.

At the risk of reading too much into it, I think that’s a perfect metaphor for Bush’s career. There’s a recurring theme of empathy and love and human interaction throughout her work, but never a sense that she’s defined by anyone else. The songs are inescapably hers, and even when she’s playing a character, it’s a character that she created.

And the final thing I find fascinating about Babooshka is that it sounds so much like an ABBA song. On every album of hers that I’ve heard, the sound is all over the place, reminding me at times of ABBA, the Carpenters, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Peter Gabriel, Kirsty MacColl, the Eurythmics, Pink Floyd, Queen, and probably dozens more that I’d recognize if I had more expansive taste in music. (Not to mention artists like St Vincent and Tori Amos, who’ve declared outright that Bush was an influence on their own work). But even when you can place it in a specific time period, it never sounds derivative or pandering.

If she were pandering, there’d be no explanation for Delius, which is beautiful and memorable and undeniably, unabashedly weird. Or for that matter, the concept album second half of Hounds of Love, which has tracks that are just as melodic as anything from her singles, not to mention an Irish reel that would’ve made me a lifelong fan if I’d only heard it when I was in the middle of my obsession with the Pogues. But it’s not at all concerned with being commercial, and only exists as a purely personal expression.

Even when that expression isn’t high-minded or cerebral, and just putting on costumes and goofing off with a bunch of friends and collaborators.

Stepping Out of the Page

So in other words: yes I said yes, I finally get it now. And what’s more, I wouldn’t have been able to get it in 1990. If for no other reason than I didn’t have Neil Gaiman to explain to me that the title track of The Sensual World was inspired by and referenced Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, and I didn’t have easy access to Ulysses to get the significance of that.

And even if I had, I would’ve thought that the significance of that soliloquy is just a woman’s anachronistically frank and vulgar discussion of her own sexuality. I would have — and did — come to the vapid, simple-minded conclusion that it’s just about being “sex-positive.” But the whole significance is much more than that; it’s how the stream of consciousness is an unpunctuated torrent of the entirety of her experience: vaginas and religion and landladies and chocolates and paintings and gossip and cigarettes and cleaning semen out of sheets and castles and geraniums and breasts and flowers of the mountain. And how she says yes to all of it.

And I wouldn’t have had instant access to decades of a body of work, and all the articles and documentaries and interviews that interpret it and put it in context. So I couldn’t have fully appreciated how that soliloquy would be significant to someone who’d spent years pouring all of her work and energy into sharing her experience without much thought over whether it was commercial or even accessible but just that it was genuine and uniquely hers.

For almost every one of Kate Bush’s videos, I can instantly tell roughly when it was made, whether she was responding to the “look” of the decade or whether she was helping define it. This is mid-to-late 70s, that’s clearly mid-80s, that’s absolutely a product of the early 90s. The exception is The Sensual World, which is timeless. It could’ve been made last year, or it could’ve been dropped to Earth as a response to the Voyager disc.

I’d said that seeing it again recently was like vividly remembering images from a dream, and that’s still the case. But now that I’ve caught up with the people who’ve been lifelong fans of Kate Bush, the images are even more powerful. In that documentary, St Vincent describes Hounds of Love, Stefon-like, as “that thing where it burns like wildfire and then comes alive,” and Viv Albertine describes it like repressed sexuality, as if “the whole song’s on a leash, but you know it’s gonna escape and burst and run free.”

For me, it’s that tremendous moment of release in The Sensual World where she removes her headdress and is dancing barefoot in front of a field of flames. And seeing her confidently and effortlessly dance backwards down a moonlit path in a velvet dress is the most beautiful thing.

This triggered my own irrational outrage over the outrage. (Although really, I’m a recently unemployed white dude in his early 40s. I think that sitting around at home writing angry letters about stuff is what I’m supposed to be doing). After all, I saw Best Buy’s tweet when it was retweeted by the Serial podcast twitter account itself. Somebody there thought it was humorous, and they’re the ones who are actually more invested in the case than some internet rando. They’ve actually talked to the people involved, read the testimony, heard from the victim’s parents, spoken at length to the accused, and become attached enough to devote over a year of their lives to it.

That made me realize what annoys me so much about the response: it’s just a show of ghoulish self-importance. And the lack of self-importance is my favorite aspect of the Serial podcast.

Almost all of my exposure to “true crime” stories is from the A&E (and A&E-styled) documentaries like City Confidential and so on. A guaranteed 30 minutes a week — even more, when you include repeats and marathons — of lurid details of horrific crimes. Long pans across grainy photographs of the victim, over the constant synthesizer dirge that lets you know this is very serious. Bill Curtis’s grave voice-over stretching about 10 minutes’ worth of evidence into 22 minutes plus commercials. And after the commercial break: the one detail that would blow this case wide open.

It’s personal tragedies, packaged up, commodified, and repeated. All the cases run together. All the details intermingle. Every few minutes the dirge stops long enough for an ad for Applebee’s or Volkswagens. It’s all a show of how gravely serious and respectful these documentarians are being, when it’s anything but respectful. It’s the equivalent of the slow fade to black at the end of the Oscars “In Memoriam” segment: a worse-than-empty gesture, since it tosses the lives of a bunch of people into a crock pot and serves it up as commercial television.

Serial, on the other hand, seems absolutely devoted to remaining bullshit-free. Sarah Koenig isn’t a voice-over artist, nor is she a grieving family member. She’s a reporter. Her tone can come across as flippant until you actually listen to the podcast and realize it’s anything but. She’s not looking for drama; she’s looking for the truth, or at least as close to the truth as a podcast can get. And the truth is that sometimes, she doesn’t know what to believe. Sometimes she calls interview subjects on something that makes no sense, or something she doesn’t agree with, even though letting them finish would’ve made for a better sound bite. Sometimes she thinks she has incontrovertible proof; she’s found the Key Takeaway Moment of the entire story, and then realizes she doesn’t. Sometimes there’s a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib.

I’ve seen a few discussions about Koenig’s and the producers’ desire to remain objective. But I don’t think that’s their desire at all. “Objectivity” has been twisted to become a bizarre display of moral relativism, a way to say absolutely nothing by qualifying definitive statements with “allegedly” and “some say” and “according to.” On the podcast, Koenig isn’t objective but impartial. She calls a tragedy for what it is, and she acknowledges the grief of the families, but she doesn’t make empty, token gestures of false respect or deference. She’ll say exactly what she believes and doesn’t believe, and she’ll make it clear exactly to what degree she’s actually invested in the case. Which is as much as any reporter can be who’s spent that much time researching the violent death of a stranger. And which is definitely more than anybody lobbing sanctimonious recriminations on Twitter.

For a good illustration of the difference between objective, invested, and invested but impartial, check out Rabia Chaudry’s blog posts about the case and the podcast. She’s obviously not impartial (and makes no claims to be) and personally invested in the case. She’s still publishing facts, or at least her interpretation of them, mixed in with her impressions and memories. In fact, one of the recurring themes of the podcast, and likely the only definitive takeaway we’re going to get from the podcast, is exactly that lack of objectivity. The same facts, even if remembered correctly at all after 15 years, can be interpreted to mean opposite things.

And for a good example of why I don’t take at all seriously the outrage over Best Buy’s tweet (which didn’t at all make light of the murder, just the fact that the store doesn’t have a pay phone), check out the image above. One of America’s absolute worst people, Michelle Malkin, jumping on the outrage bandwagon like a cackling hyena. There’s nothing even remotely resembling respect or reverence for Hae Min Lee there. It’s all just a show.

I say let Best Buy crack harmless jokes, and let Mail Chimp take advantage of a meme while it still can. Both are at least genuine acknowledgements of the fact that we’re all wrapped up in accounts of the murder and life imprisonment of two strangers, using their tragedy for our own entertainment. And save the self-righteous indignation for a time when it’s at least a little bit less hypocritical.

Everything we do is to make our audiences feel like they’re the most important person in the whole world. And that’s a real good thing.

Good morning, internet! Boy, it’s a good day today. Real good.

We had a little bit of “drama” over the past few weeks, but that’s all over with now, and we can go back to normal. We can go back to talking about progress, and inclusivity, and making sure that everybody’s voice gets heard.

Some people, like Elizabeth Sampat, get sad and angry about the whole thing, and that’s not good at all. Getting angry isn’t objective. Getting angry just helps the bad people, and we don’t want to be like the bad people.

Sampat can remind us all that it’s been seven years since people tried to wish Jade Raymond into the cornfield, and we could get all gloomy about how the situation hasn’t gotten any better. But isn’t it more constructive to think about all the good things we’ve done? For my part: I’ve said multiple times — out loud, even — that I don’t believe anyone should be harassed, and I’ve also bravely retweeted at least two messages from other people on the topic, even though I knew it was risky because some people might consider them “feminist.”

Leigh Alexander got so hostile and dismissive, and we don’t like it when women condescend to us. She actually said that people who identify as “gamers” are irrelevant. She said that the “obtuse shitslingers” and “wailing hyper-consumers” aren’t her audience, and they didn’t have to be ours. And oh boy did a lot of real smart people have a lot to say in response to the issues she raised! This is a really complicated issue with a lot of “facets,” so they made sure to flood the comments with criticism of her tone.

We don’t need to fight when there’s plenty of good stuff being done, too! There are lots of people working on games sites who took the completely non-misogynistic concerns of journalist integrity seriously. They said of course they condemn intrusive, demeaning, sexist harassment of women in gaming, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask questions about who it is and isn’t appropriate for a woman game developer to have sex with. That resulted in real change in the industry: a prominent site about video games will still run the steady stream of press releases from corporate video game publishers, but writers can no longer contribute to smaller independent projects and developers they want to support, because that would be collusion. It’s like what David Auerbach on Slate tells the angry young male gamers to help them get through this tough time: “people are listening, and your concerns are legitimate.”

And also a bunch of 4channers contributed to a charity promoting women in game development! That’s a real, real good thing, and there’s been no shortage of writers and bloggers giving them credit for it. Even if it started with the goal of spiting a woman developer, how could anyone say these guys have a problem with women? They created an imaginary woman who fit the image they all agreed to, who shared their interests and ideals, and who they could use as an avatar to represent them and speak through! If you’re going to be so uptight as to have a problem with that, I suppose next you’re going to say that Weird Science wasn’t an empowering work of new-wave feminism.

This is just a huge, complicated issue and it’s not going to change. If we want everyone to have an equal voice, we just have to accept that occasionally, someone’s going to get wished into the cornfield for using her voice to say something that’s not nice.

Justice in Moderation

I’ve always liked to see myself as progressive, moderate, and skeptical. Of course I believe that women should have equality in voice, representation, and depiction. And of course I absolutely condemn attempts to harass, threaten, or even demean women. That all goes without saying.

But I also never wanted to be so wrapped up in self-righteousness that I lost any sense of objectivity. Whenever I read anything that seems too didactic, too simple-minded, too black-and-white, I start asking, “what’s the catch?” Of course I condemn those sexist assholes, and they don’t speak for me. But I’ve always believed it’s important to rise above the trolls and circular arguments, and talk about things like rational adults.

As it turns out, that was pretty much bullshit, since by letting it “go without saying,” by keeping silent and calling it “moderation,” I was by definition letting the sexist assholes speak for me.

Earlier it sounded like I was just giving Devin Faraci shit for his essay, but I absolutely can’t fault his sincerity or his intent. After all, a few days ago I was trying to do the same thing. I’d been seeing all the reports of harassment, and I started wondering out loud what kind of mentality causes socially awkward nerds to become such violent bullies. I was saying that obviously, there are some irredeemable assholes motivated entirely by misogyny. But what about the non-trolls who feel so powerless they’ve convinced themselves that they’re the ones who are under attack?

A friend pointed out, simply: “I wouldn’t call them non-trolls.” And it was as if a lightning bolt finally struck through all the layers of rationalization and self-assurance I’d built up, and all the pieces started to fall into place. I realized that I was giving all of my sympathy to the people who deserved it the least, and all my skepticism and criticism to the people who deserved it least. Any second spent trying to figure out what makes these assholes tick is a second that’d be better spent trying to actually help the people who are being targeted by them.

It simply doesn’t matter what motivates these assholes — whether they’re seriously damaged psychologically, or they’re self-important “free-thinkers,” or they’re doing it “for the lulz.” You’ll see a lot of dismissals along the lines of “it’s not personal,” or “it’s just a game to them,” or “misogyny isn’t really the problem; it’s rooted in power/bullying/anonymity/whatever.” As if it’s somehow better if a person says, “Sure, I was part of the crowd targeting this person and her friends and family with rape threats, death threats, hacking attempts, a deluge of demeaning and critical messages on every social network, and YouTube videos, but I was doing it ironically.” The reality is that they are, demonstrably, provably, causing serious problems for people who don’t deserve it. And no one deserves it.

Looking through the harassing tweets that some women (and occasionally men) get, you see the same pattern over and over again: blatantly fake sock puppet accounts and compromised accounts, all repeating the same shit over and over again, most making sure to mention that it’s a huge, orchestrated groundswell. Unlike Sand People, but just like the One Million Moms, these people have to keep inflating their numbers, saying “We Are Legion.” Obviously, on some level it’s to help them justify it to themselves. But it’s also intended to isolate their targets. To make their targets feel alone and think there’s nothing any of us can do to stop the horde.

The least that we can do is put that shit to rest. Don’t just assume that everybody understands these assholes are a vocal minority; prove it. I know I’ve seen the lists of “Social Justice Warriors to Avoid,” and I’ve pointed and laughed, and I’ve said “Ha ha this just tells me who I should support you silly misogynists lol!” What we all should have been doing is seeing it as a condemnation. Not just “why aren’t I on that list?” but “how did we ever give these clowns the impression that they could fit us all on one page?”

Privilege Check and Mate

In my case, it’s because I’m really, really smart. I don’t want to brag, you guys, but I can see complexities and angles and hidden agendas that no one else on the internet can. Show me two extremes, and I can find problems with each of them. I don’t want to identify with either extreme; I want to see through all the angles and champion the truth. I’m like Yojimbo.

Here’s an example of how smart I am: for months I’ve been thinking about a blog post that’s going to drop a truth bomb smack in the middle of the internet and convince everybody to get along. The elevator pitch: I think “white male privilege” is bullshit. The concept behind it is absolutely, totally, 100% real; you’d have to be an idiot not to recognize that. But the things that people are calling “privileges” are actually injustices; they’re not special advantages but things that all people should have. The term “privilege” is outdated. It’s deliberately provocative, intended to make people feel uncomfortable to shock them into awareness. When the concept of civil rights was unfamiliar enough to be a “movement,” it made sense. Now, though, people spend so much time explaining what “privilege” means that the connotations of the word have outweighed its usefulness. It’s become counter-productive and divisive.

A few times, I’ve tested the waters for my groundbreaking theory by going online and saying “‘White male privilege’ is bullshit.” Here are the responses I’ve gotten:

On Facebook, a young woman said “oh no when I use the word ‘privilege’ I mean this…” and linked to an essay about the subject. One of the key lines in that essay was, “Inclusivity can make some people feel uncomfortable.”

Another young woman on Facebook said “I don’t know why guys just can’t get the f over ‘privilege.’ Nobody’s saying that you didn’t have to work hard for what you have.”

On Twitter, some asshole looking to pick a fight said I was “whining” about how bad I had it and said “oh you poor baby” before calling me a c-word. (Obviously, she didn’t actually say “c-word.” I know it makes me sound like the villain from Misery, but no matter what I can’t say that word).

Can you see the breakdown there, the decades-long chain of misunderstanding? I’d guess at least 51% of you can see the problem right away.

The problem is that I can go online and say something deliberately provocative, and I can count the amount of push-back I got on one hand. And two of those were even people trying to help!

You could make a solidly convincing case that I’m just not famous or popular enough for anybody to notice or care. Except even on the occasions where I’ve gotten a “signal boost” from somebody famous, I still haven’t gotten any significant harassment. Once a blog post I wrote started a brief conversation on Twitter with Rhianna Pratchett. I got a few responses, some critical, some just “THIS!” followed by a link. I checked out her Twitter replies, though, and she was getting tons of criticism. Over something that I wrote.

The nature of the “criticism” is different, too. When a guy gets attacked, they almost always attack his ideas. When a woman gets attacked, they attack her.

Even when I thought “I get it,” I still didn’t quite get it. Even while acknowledging that I don’t have to suffer the same type of bullshit that a lot of other people have to go through, I still wanted to argue that the problem that needed to be addressed was that we were being made to feel uncomfortable.

Not All Mean

But white men get harassment, too. And suffer through the same injustices and tragedies and hardships that every human being has to go through. It genuinely is petty to use the phrase “winning the genetic lottery,” and it genuinely is unproductive to sling that a guy who doesn’t feel as if he’s been giving the magic bullet that will solve all of his problems.

Which is why it can seem like the whole backlash and meme-ification of “Not All Men!” is petty and vindictive. Sure, when someone drops “Not all men” into a conversation, or says “Men get it too!”, it can seem like an attempt to derail an argument with a pedantic counter-example, as if the whole argument were invalid. But I’ve often thought, instead of making fun of it and turning it into a hashtag, wouldn’t it be better to acknowledge the intent behind it? To see that it’s an attempt at empathy, and not condescension? Instead of just saying, “You don’t understand how bad I have it, and you’ll never understand,” wouldn’t it be better to say, “No, I don’t understand that, but I can relate in this way, because I’ve had a similar problem?”

I believe the main problem there — and it’s not necessarily a fair one — is false equivalence. Even if it’s intended to be empathetic, it’s still floated out there as if it were a counter-argument, a correction. It will never not come across as, “What you’re saying is bad, but my having to feel defensive is every bit as a bad!” It puts all the weight on “Well, I’m not like that!” and leaves all the work for the other person to decipher the intent.

Again, it assumes that we’re coming into the conversation from an equal place, we’re all on the same side after all, so we can start discussing all the finer points and subtleties that the “extremists” keep missing while they scream at each other. But we’re not coming from the same place. In my case, at least, there’s never been a lack of awareness that we’re not coming from the same place. I’ve just never acknowledged just how many assumptions I’ve made without realizing it. Yes, I probably have a lot more in common with a woman in her late 30s who likes video games, than I do with the vast majority of white men. But that just means I can assume we’re on the same page when we’re talking about Final Fantasy, not when we’re talking about being a woman on the internet. Or anywhere else.

I spent about a year working on a project whose lead was a young woman unquestionably well-suited to that position: organized, driven but able to delegate, etc. Still, people would come up and ask me questions as if I had any clue as to what was going on. And when I’d point to her and say, “She’s the boss,” they’d act surprised. Whenever I’ve read novels and screenplays that describe how a character can convey an entire sentence with just an expression, I’ve always dismissed it as lazy writing. But I’d swear to God one guy gave me a look that said, “Seriously? You’re that p-whipped?” And even when there wasn’t a nasty intent behind it, she’d still get tons of dismissive comments. One of the security guys called her “princess” every single time we went through the gate. It annoyed the hell out of me, but she just shrugged it off. I was describing that situation to a co-worker at my current job, and she just kind of laughed (good-naturedly!) as my naivety. What I would take as absolutely intolerable, she recognized as pretty much a day-to-day occurance.

We’ve got options: we can acknowledge that, and then move forward, keeping it as a constant reminder that we should listen as much as we talk. We can feel guilty about it, and despair that there’s nothing we can do about it except sympathize. Or we can interpret it as an attack, and get angry and defensive.

I’m Not Sure I Like Your Tone

Defensiveness is the mind-killer. It is the little-death that tricks us into believing that apathy is action. It creates an immediate problem that we think is solvable — clearly, if everyone could just understand how this offends me and people like me, we could all get along — while ignoring the systematic, longer-running problem that’s driving all of our assumptions. It lets us believe that by not siding with the “extremes,” we’re standing firm on the center path to equality, even though we’ve seen time and time again that the “center path” inherently favors white dudes.

That’s why a guy who goes by “Total Biscuit” can post a call for everybody to calm down and not “pick sides”, and be completely sincere as far as I can tell, and still have so many people yelling at him. (Including me). It’s just one big false equivalence after the other. He says that “social justice warrior” and “men’s rights activist” are just two meaningless insults that people keep throwing around in an attempt to dismiss and over-simplify each other’s viewpoint, but neither one actually exists. Well, I hate to break it to you, “Biscuit”, but Men’s Rights Activists absolutely exist. They’re a lunatic fringe — that Washington Post article is astoundingly even-handed and even sympathetic, but still doesn’t hesitate to acknowledge that they’re preaching bullshit — but not only are they real, their “men are the victims” bullshit is the basis for all of the harassment going on. Equating it to “a feminist yelled at me that one time so feminism is extremist dogma” isn’t just misguided, it’s demonstrably false.

Not to mention: “SJW” and “MRA” aren’t even the same kind of term. “MRA” is the euphemism these assholes use to describe themselves. If we were going to pick a pejorative term to sling at them, we’d just call them for what they are: misogynists.

He’s also wrong when he says that the term “SJW” is meaningless. It’s actually a very useful shorthand, like “white knight” and “politically correct”. You can use it to instantly determine a person’s worldview and motivations. Just never the way it’s intended, because it says nothing about the speaker’s target but everything you need to know about the speaker.

One of my proudest and most hilarious achievements is when I had a guy on Twitter call me a “white knight” for something I’d written, saying that I was only criticizing GTA 5 because I wanted to get women to sleep with me. Once the laughter had died down, it was clear that the guy couldn’t even conceive why someone would say something in favor of women for any reason other than because he wanted sex. What else are women good for, after all? And the “social justice warriors” are only speaking out about diversity because they want to be seen as heroes and champions; why else would anyone speak out on this except out of self-interest? And why would anybody try to be more conscious of being inclusive and respectful? It can’t really be a desire to be “correct,” but as a shallow acknowledgement of some political agenda.

Just about the only thing I’d agree with Mr. Biscuit about: there aren’t “two sides” here. That absolutely doesn’t mean that it’s a complex, multi-faceted issue. It just means that there aren’t two equal and opposing sides. There’s the fact that women are entitled to equal voice and equal representation writing, making, and playing video games. That’s it.

And again — video games. I moved cross-country and devoted my entire career to video games, and I still can’t believe the kind of self-obsessed lunatic that would make such a big deal about them.

Ready Manchild One

Anyone who says that there’s more going on here is just wrong. Whether they’re intentionally misleading you, or looking for an excuse to keep on doing nothing, or just confused, it doesn’t matter. And entertaining them as if they have a valid point isn’t being moderate or objective; it’s picking a side. Their side.

I’d always said that by giving any attention to the “trolls,” you’re just giving them a voice they didn’t deserve. I was wrong. Ignoring them gives them a voice they didn’t deserve. Someone on Twitter made a pretty good analogy: if you leave the weeds alone, they’ll eventually grow to choke out an entire garden. Instead of leaving all the work to the targets of abuse, harassment, and discrimination to just “deal with it,” we need to make more of an effort ourselves to go through periodically and get rid of the weeds. Saying “trolls gonna troll, ain’t no stoppin’ it!” is worse than ineffectual; it just gives up what is literally the least we could to help, which is to show our support.

If you engage one of these clowns — and I really can’t recommend it to anyone — you’ll see how quickly all their supposedly high-minded concerns fall apart into childish selfishness. We do need to identify where it comes from, not to give them sympathy and ease their fears, and sure as hell not to “let them know their concerns are legitimate.” We need to know where it comes from so we can all identify exactly how we’re all complicit. I can only point fingers at 4chan, or ‘gaming journalism,” or wicked games publishers, or “argumentative” activists, or the targets themselves, for so long before I’ve only got one person left to point at.

My friend Matt Dessem had an insightful theory that seems obvious in retrospect: video games and comics deal primarily in power fantasies, so of course they’re going to attract an audience that feels powerless. He equated the situation to the GOP spending so much time courting the Tea Party, and then acting surprised when it turned out so many of them were unrepentant racists and misogynists.

We can’t act surprised that the video game audience is so hostile and paranoid, completely losing their shit at the sight of anything they don’t like or find even remotely challenging. We spend all of our time telling each of them that he’s the most important person in the whole world. Even in games that aren’t explicitly about saving the universe, the entire medium of interactive entertainment is inherently a power fantasy: this entire world exists because of you, things only happen because you make them happen.

When a bunch of people were calling video games “murder simulators,” I thought we all agreed that it was only okay because players could separate fantasy from reality. But we’ve taken the premise that each (male, usually white) player is the most important person in the universe, and we’ve extended it to the real world. Publishers have always said “give the people what they want,” but as the budgets have increased, there’s been even less room for anything resembling challenging content or artistic expression. Game criticism — actual game criticism, and not just reviews — has spent years focused on player agency on the assumption that, essentially, artistic intent is for linear media, and games are different.

I’ve seen writers for game sites — who should know better — insist that if enough readers are interested in something, it’s worth addressing. That’s not even theoretically wrong; we’ve seen how wrong it is. We’ve seen exactly what happens when “journalists” forget their responsibility and instead start to believe their role is simply to parrot back everything they hear in the name of “objectivity.” It’s what makes revenue-focused “news” sources give equal time to climate change deniers.

None of this is a new or earth-shattering observation. It’s not even the first time I’ve realized it. I just never had to consider how important it was, because I was complaining about echo chambers from within the safety of my own echo chamber.

A Decent Actress, I Guess

As I’ve watched the harassment of women happen with increasing regularity, I keep thinking back to one event: a panel at Wondercon with the cast of one of the Resident Evil movies.

Nerd conventions are generally great for “high functioning” nerds like myself; we get a safe space to go and gawk and pretend that we’re somehow cooler and better-adjusted than everyone else. And the horrible but perversely thrilling highlight is always the celebrity panel, when they open the microphone up to Q&A from the audience. For the socially awkward, it’s kind of like watching other people fire-walk: we don’t have to go across the hot coals ourselves, but we can marvel at it and wait for something to go horribly wrong.

At this panel, the thing that went horribly wrong was this: a dude came up to the microphone and decided it’d be the perfect time to sack up and finally let actress Ali Larter know how he felt about her ruining the show Heroes. He said, “I mean, you’re a decent actress, I guess” but how did she feel knowing that her character was “pretty much universally” considered the thing that ruined the series? Her face was projected up on the huge screen in front of everybody, so we could all see her “what the hell is happening right now?!” expression as this brave young man fearlessly spoke up in complete anonymity out of the darkness.

But then a magical thing happened: the crowd started booing, and it got louder until it shut that asshole up and drove him away from the microphone. They didn’t say, “Well, he’s just speaking his mind; he’s not actually making any actionable threats.” They didn’t say, “Eh, it’s a nerd convention. This kind of thing is bound to happen.” They didn’t say, “We’ll just let the convention moderators take care of it.” They didn’t say, “She’s an actress; she’s going to have to get a thicker skin if she wants to survive for long.” They didn’t say, “This is representative of the inherent power struggle in which people of lower social standing ‘punch up’ against the established higher social class.” They didn’t say, “He’s just socially awkward and is probably motivated by years of being bullied himself.”

They just said “boo” enough times to make it clear that this shit was completely unacceptable. And because the camera stayed fixed on Ms. Larter, you could see her expression change from surprise at being attacked to one of relief that she was finally getting shown some support. During a later question, she started with, “Sorry, I just can’t believe how mean that guy was!” and got a laugh, which broke the tension.

Notice that I said they booed him off the stage. I spent the whole time standing in a dark corner at the back of the auditorium, just thinking about how horribly awkward the whole thing was and how uncomfortable it made me feel. Ever since, I’ve wished that I’d joined in.

Yes, Slate. As I was reading, I had to double-check the URL to make sure I hadn’t been spoof-linked onto Michelle Malkin’s site, because it’s full of the kind of equality-undermining language that made Malkin America’s sweetheart. (As in, “Sweetheart, go away and play by yourself. The grown-ups are trying to have a conversation here.”)

I should point out that on the “DoubleX Gabfest” podcast discussing the post, the discussion is less blatantly offensive and just more subtly gross. They celebrate the overturn of DOMA, and they acknowledge (somewhat) the distinction between an open relationship and infidelity. Still, the subtle grossness — treating gay relationships as equal but separate, combined with some old-school “Women Are From Venus” type BS — is worth drawing attention to. That’s the kind of attitude that will persist long after gay Americans — eventually, after an unnecessarily long legal process in state after state — have the freedom to marry.

But first, let’s go over again everything that’s awful about that original blog post.

Dirty Little Secret

To start with, the headline is a two-fer. First, the assertion that “Most gay couples aren’t monogamous,” which is based on “an old study from the 80s” (which is actually from the late 70s to early 80s, and which doesn’t mention sample size or diversity), and which makes no distinction between infidelity and open relationships. This gets the lede instead of the more recent and longer-term (but still “problematic,” for reasons I’ll get to in a second) study, which came to the conclusion that it wasn’t “most” but about half. That study also made the distinction between “sex outside of marriage” with the partner’s consent.

Which leads to the second problem with the headline, the “Dirty Little Secret” part:

In the fight for marriage equality, the gay rights movement has put forth couples that look like straight ones, together forever, loyal, sharing assets. But what no one wants to talk about is that they don’t necessarily represent the norm:
[…]
In writing about the subject, gay people emphasize the aspects of their relationships that sound most wholesome and straight-like, Steven Thrasher writes. They neglect to mention that, say, in Thrasher’s case, he met his partner for sex only once, and they ended up falling in love. The larger point being that gay couples are very different when it comes to sex, even if this is not the convenient moment to discuss that.

Again: not Bill O’Reilly; this was in Slate.

The idea is that in this bit of social justice theater that’s been given the politically-correct name “marriage equality” — earlier, Rosin calls it the “gay marriage experiment” — while the gay people have been asking straight people for permission to get “married,” we’ve been careful only to expose the relationships that’ll make us look normal and wholesome. That lesbian couple in their 80s who’ve been together for decades, the woman whose partner died before their relationship was ever sanctioned by the state. The shameful truth, of course, is that homos just can’t get enough of the d. A gay writer for Gawker, even, has to admit that his relationship was the result of a one-night stand. And no less than the intellectual progenitor of the gay marriage movement, Andrew Sullivan, met his husband at — gasp! — a “sex-and-drug filled circuit party”! [warning: Gawker link]

There’s so much wrong here, it’s difficult to know where to start. Do you go with the Gawker trademark of prudish scandal-mongering disguised as open-mindedness? (For example: we’re totally fine with the gay people, of course, but we’re still gonna out Tim Cook and pass it off as “why is he hiding?!”)

Or the idea that how a couple meets has anything to do with the quality or stability of their relationship?

Or the level of slut-shaming that’s required to assert that people must be hiding how sexually active they are, or how they met, because they’re ashamed of it?

Or the way Rosin casually treats open relationships and infidelity as if they were interchangeable? Which denies the entire concept of an open relationship, which sets up boundaries so that the commitment of the relationship is preserved without having to be looking for sex on the down-low?

Or the blithe ignorance/denial of the fact that these decades-long relationships started in an environment that treated homosexuality as if it were something shameful? That’s essentially the same “argument” that opponents of marriage equality have used since the beginning: of course it’s absurd that homosexuals should be allowed to “marry,” look at how immoral they are for having all that sex outside of marriage!

Or do we talk about the hypocrisy of suggesting that straight couples are inherently wholesome? Two of the things that neither Rosin nor Thrasher mention about that long-running study of gay couples: 1) They were all gay men, 2) They were all in the San Francisco Bay Area. We can all gauge our own levels of how much we want to call bullshit on making wide extrapolations about all couples based solely on a study of gay men; I definitely don’t ascribe to the straight-from-the-50s stereotype of men as constant horndogs, but I do believe that on the whole, women tend to be a bit more relationship-focused. Regardless, it’s tough to accept as a representative sample when there are no lesbians involved.

I have a lot more reservations about the “San Francisco Bay Area” part. There’s just no denying that this place is a bubble, and things are different here. I’ve seen a lot more unconventional heterosexual relationships in the bay area than I ever saw back east, and I have to call foul on any study that doesn’t consider gay couples in more conservative parts of the country like, say, Minneapolis, or even Atlanta.

So Like Us

The easiest response to a post like Rosin’s is pfft, as if straight couples don’t have issues with divorce and infidelity. And that’s valid, but too easy. Among other things, it’s a race to the lowest common denominator: gay people are no worse than we are!

It’s why, in what passes for “debate” online, we’ve always heard about Leviticus and mixed fibers and homosexual penguins and Britney Spears’s quickie Vegas wedding. It’s why a lot of people scream about being “heteronormative” as if gay people were dropped into straight society from some kind of alien asexual breeding planet. And really, in terms of baseline equality-as-recognized-by-the-state, that’s fine. Years ago, I saw a good quote on a message board, paraphrased: “I want to see a gay couple go to Vegas, get drunk out of their minds, have a quickie wedding, and then get divorced the next day. Then they’ll be equal.”

Opponents of marriage equality have always tried to disguise their homophobia by pulling in talk about procreation, child-rearing, gender roles, religious freedom, and “traditional” marriage, and never mentioning their “dirty little secret,” which is that their laws and bans are invariably nothing but anti-gay. Because if they really wanted to assert that marriage is all about procreation, they’d have to ban marriage for heterosexual people who can’t or don’t want to bear children of their own. And that will never, ever happen.

So the tactic for opponents of marriage equality is the same as with every gay rights issue: spin it around to establish that gay people have something to be ashamed of. “Prove to us why we should allow your sex-and-drug-fueled debauchery to be called a ‘marriage.'” And for the proponents, it’s exactly what makes marriage equality a no-brainer of a non-argument: gay couples don’t have any more or less to prove than straight couples do.

As a baseline for legally mandated equality, it’s fine. As a model for long-term, societal equality, though, it’s a hell of a low bar to set. “They’re not any worse than we are.” It comes across as a too-literal interpretation of “tolerance:” we’ll put up with the gays because it’s the right thing to do. It leaves people like Ross Douthat feeling anxious and afraid, just biding his time until we make it through this Liberal Nightmare of a society, and we can all once again be free to say what we’re really thinking.

It also stresses diversity over inclusivity, tolerance over equality. Because for the half of gay men in that study who “admitted” to having sex outside of their relationship, there’s still half that didn’t. Because presenting the struggle for gay rights as a well-orchestrated show of public relations — for which, at the time of this writing, with a majority of the United States still having constitutional bans against marriage equality, Andrew Sullivan is very concerned about whom gets the proper credit — there’s still the fact that two women had been together for decades, and one died before her marriage was recognized by her country. Yes, of course we should account for Dan Savage’s self-described “monogamish” relationship. But not as the representative sample of all gay relationships, and not at the expense of the relationships that are overwhelmingly, boringly, “traditional.”

Rosin puts forward straight relationships as the ones by which gay relationships can and should be judged. The immediate objection is that nobody should be judged on the basis of how “normal” they are or aren’t. But the better objection is that the notion of “normal” is largely bullshit. There are gay couples that fell in love in high school and have been committed to each other for years; there are straight couples that met during a one-night stand and ended in divorce. And every permutation thereof, regardless of gender and genitalia.

Even if you’re looking for trends, and even if you’re accounting for the fact that gay couples of “marrying age” have spent a big part of their lives in a society that treats them as if they were suffering from a mental disorder, there are still plenty of relationships that defy convention by being completely conventional. And a huge number of relationships that prove that what we think of as “conventional” is mostly fiction. How many stories about “unconventional” marriages do we have to hear before we all finally accept that Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best weren’t ever really the overwhelming norm?

And I don’t even want to get into the whole question of “sex outside of marriage.” People have been so intrusive and vulgar when talking about marriages of gay couples, that I’m wondering if I’ve been going to the wrong straight weddings all these years. Is it normal for the married couple to flash their genitals at the audience for verification? Is everyone else in the audience listening to all the jibber-jabber about “love, honor, and devotion” and thinking, “those two are totally doin’ it?” Have I just been missing the part where the couple parades the wedding sheets in front of the village, as proof of the bride’s maidenhead?

It betrays an almost Victorian prudishness, and a peculiar obsession with sex, to treat infidelity and open relationships as casually interchangeable as Rosin and Thrasher do, as lumped-together signs of changing moral standards and our diminishing desire for monogamy. An open relationship is almost the opposite of infidelity; it acknowledges that the relationship is entirely about trust, honesty, and commitment, and not just about sex.

PINO Egregious

Again, while I maintain that Rosin’s blog post is straight-up bullshit, the accompanying podcast is less objectionable. However, it trades the blatantly gross “gay people are lying to the country about their sordid sex-filled ‘relationships'” for the more delicately gross “aren’t gay couples just fascinating to us normal couples?”

The article that sparked the whole business was one in The Atlantic which asked, unironically as far as I can tell, what can gay couples teach us about relationships? On the podcast, they’re very pro-gay, and they’re celebrating the (very recent, at the time) overturn of DOMA. But they seem to be unaware that the tone of the entire discussion is distressingly similar to, “What can all of these talented African Americans teach us about rhythm?” or “We have so much to learn from the Asians about math and the martial arts.”

The tone of the podcast is that open marriages are fine for them — you go, gays! — but let’s keep straight marriages traditional. I’m not exactly paraphrasing, either: around the 13 minute mark in the “gabfest”, there’s the assertion that straight men would be happier with open relationships than straight women would be. (“Not all men,” because of course someone said “not all men.”) And then the thought that maybe this discussion opens up the opportunity for everyone to think about their relationships, an idea that one of the women shuts right down: “I kind of hope that gay marriages can function as gay marriages function, and that’s perfectly fine if it works for them, and I’m also okay with straight marriages being traditional. […] If there are no boundaries, it sort of makes me feel lost.”

This kind of thinking alarms me, because this is the kind of thinking that ends up with someone telling me, “We just want you to know how happy we are about your gayness. We got you this leather harness to wear at your foam parties!” It’s why I make a distinction between diversity and actual inclusiveness — thinking solely about “diversity” reduces individuals to demographics, assuming homogeneity based on one trait that may or may not define them.

It’s “Progressive In Name Only,” more concerned about a baseline level of tolerance than about actual equality, or the progress that comes from actual understanding. I don’t have any interest in casting aspersions on Dan Savage’s or Andrew Sullivan’s relationships, nor am I interested in looking down on people who wear leather harnesses or go to foam parties. I don’t even know if a leather harness is something a person would wear to a foam party. All I know is that it all gets lumped together as “gay stuff.”

A while ago, there was a motion in San Francisco to ban public nudity except for during special events (like the Folsom Street Fair, for instance). Even though it was about as reasonable as you can possibly get, there was a sizable outcry, with a lot of people insisting that such a ban would be anti-gay. As I’ve often wondered since I moved to the Bay Area and suddenly found myself a “moderate” instead of the “flaming liberal” I’d been in the southeast, I wondered if I was the only person who was having problems calling this a “gay issue.” I mentioned it to my barber — a man who’s been with the same man for 20 years and has chosen not to get married, incidentally — and was surprised that he was even more conservative about it than I was: ban it outright, none of this “special events” or “put a towel down before you sit your naked ass on a public surface” compromise. Two lessons learned: 1) Calling public nudity a “gay issue” assumes that gay people are all about looking at each other’s junk; and 2) There are lots of different types of gay people.

If you support “gay marriage” because you want the gays to be able to take their party drugs and meet each other at sex parties and then get tax breaks, then… well, good. You pass the baseline requirement for not being a bigot and understanding how America works. But I sure hope you like talking about social justice issues, because there’s going to be another few hundred years of it. We’ll keep having new decades-long debates on how these special interest groups fit into normal society without stopping to consider that we’re all special interest groups.

At the beginning of the month, Ross Douthat had a piece called “The Terms of Our Surrender” published in The New York Times — which meant that at least one other adult actually read it and decided it was worthy to publish in the nation’s most revered newspaper.

I’ve heard the term “poetry slam,” but this was more like a “poetry tantrum.” Like the best poetry, he makes vividly crystalline the most abstract of concepts, in this case, “staggering lack of self-awareness.” And like the finest tantrums, he describes the plight of the hundreds of millions of people completely unaffected by marriage equality, comparing their sorry fate to that of ex-Confederates suffering through the Reconstruction.

For at least a few years now, various bigots, assholes, and bigoted assholes have, when called out on their bigoted assholery, responded with increasingly tortured attempts at self-martyrdom. When Muslim-loving liberals insist on removing Christianity from public buildings and schools, isn’t that religious intolerance and a violation of the First Amendment? When a man is deprived of his God-given right to be paid for a speaking appearance in which he compares homosexuality to bestiality, isn’t he the real victim?

Last night, a throng of perfectly well-meaning and not at all hypocritical social activists, presumably dressed as firefighters holding fire hoses that shoot confetti, all climbed out of their tiny car and took to the internet to express their outrage over a joke on Stephen Colbert’s Twitter feed, one that was horribly offensive to all people of color.

As much fun as it is to point and laugh at the silly self-described conservatives, pretending that they have consciences and ideals not motivated purely by self-interest, it’s important to see how all these are related. It’s the result of emphasizing words over ideas, getting hung up on how things are said instead of what is being said.

What we’re seeing now is nothing more than a travesty of what many progressives have been doing for years, acting as if there’s an explicit list of rules that define acceptable behavior, a literal social contract. And for some people, whenever you present them with a contract, they’ll immediately start looking for a loophole.

Getting to Negotiate

It’s worth remembering that the religious persecution that Ross Douthat is lamenting is the case of a baker who’s so filled with the Holy Spirit and message of Christ that he refused to bake a cake for a gay couple. (The comparisons to Joan of Arc, Christians in the Roman Empire, and Puritans leaving for the New World are, I hope, obvious). Douthat chooses to call this “dissent” instead of “being an asshole,” and he worries that the new dogma of the Liberal Gay Agenda is making unreasonable demands on these dissenters, completely vindictive conditions of surrender such as “people who run businesses have an obligation to serve their customers.” As he describes it:

…now, apparently, the official line is that you bigots don’t get to negotiate anymore.

Let’s completely ignore, as Douthat does, the actual principles at work here: this is a group of people who’ve spent the past two decades drawing a direct line between the love of two consenting adults and dog-fucking, but are now saying, “It’s just a cake. What’s the big deal?” So we won’t bring up some hysterical “slippery slope” example like a woman in a burkha being refused taxi service, even though we’ve seen tons of examples of actual religious persecution against Muslims in the US, such as refusing building permits to mosques.

But ignore all that, because it’s the word games that are interesting. The entire thing is such a marvel of cluelessness that you have to wonder whether Douthat deliberately chose terms like “negotiation” and “surrender” to align himself with the last few times that groups in the United States have had to surrender after losing a battle over the rights of minorities.

Part of the transcendent smarm of Douthat’s article is the way he comes right out of the gate trying to reframe the last couple of decades of gay rights issues. It hasn’t been a blatant case of a majority imposing its will on a minority, but an impassioned but reasoned debate between two equal and opposing viewpoints. The Supreme Court’s decisions against DOMA and Proposition 8 were completely arbitrary — “the logic of its own jurisprudence.” It’s not a question of inequality but of religious freedom. Opponents of marriage equality are not bigots, but a “dissenting subculture emphasizing gender differences and procreation.”

Now that the gays have won, says Douthat, it’s nothing more than petty vindictiveness for these “married” “couples” to be rubbing it in everybody’s faces. The Supreme Court says we have to pretend that these conscious couplings between homos are actual marriages, but they didn’t say we have to like it. That’s effectively thoughtcrime, and it’s surely not what Andrew Sullivan intended when he invented the concept of marriage equality. (No, seriously. Douthat actually calls Sullivan “gay marriage’s intellectual progenitor.” In the New York Times).

The terms we use to describe a concept can, over time, change the way we think about the concept. That’s something that Douthat and other proponents of genitalia-based marriage have learned over the years. Right-wingers spent years publicly decrying The Liberals’ absurd “political correctness,” while surreptitiously taking notes to take back to their volcano lair.

So, over time, they began to spin themselves as free-thinkers who could see through spin. They took one of the three fundamental branches of American government and tried to make it sound un-Democratic and un-American: “activist judges.” And they tried to make blatantly unfair discrimination sound like rational counter-argument by calling it “traditional marriage.”

Incidentally, recent attempts to change up the term “traditional marriage” are as good a sign as any that the fight for marriage equality in the US is mostly over, and all that’s left is an unnecessarily long and complicated process of cleaning up. (The people who were unaffected are still every bit as unaffected. They’re now free to whine about how their religious freedom is in danger, while leaving the actual clean-up work to the people who are still being kept from having their relationships recognized by a majority of the states). Some of the most outspoken opponents — mostly the ones who believe that the central tenet of Christianity is “#nohomo” — have started to use the term “natural marriage.” At that point, it’s clear that they’ve abandoned even their feeble attempts at pretending to have a rational objection. They’re simply falling back on the old standby: “Nope. Don’t like it. ‘Tain’t natural.”

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

The problem, of course, is that these self-described conservatives don’t understand that the terminology isn’t arbitrary. It’s not a secret list compiled and maintained by a shadowy cabal of liberals, designed solely to manufacture outrage by catching them using the non-preferred term.

In our actual reality, the terms that get traction are the ones that are either more accurate or more inclusive. For people who lack the empathy to understand why some terms are preferable to others, using “Native American” instead of “Indian” or “Asian” instead of “Chinese” seems just as absurd and arbitrary as using “womyn.”

In the case of marriage equality, there’s a history of changing terminology. Proponents started using “same sex marriage” to draw attention to the fact that civil laws never take love or even attraction into account, but instead attempt to define marriage strictly in terms of gender. And “marriage equality” itself gets to the heart of the matter; it’s not some new concept (invented by Andrew Sullivan), but simply people demanding to have exactly the same entitlements that their peers have. Opponents, on the other hand, have used “gay marriage” and “traditional marriage” and now, “natural marriage.” Those aren’t designed to be more accurate or more inclusive; they’re just a bunch of variations on the same idea: this is bad because it’s not normal.

To a person who’s motivated by self-interest — for convenience, let’s call him “Phil” — he doesn’t understand that you’d use the term “African American” instead of “black” to acknowledge that someone else’s cultural heritage is more relevant than skin color. To Phil, it’s just some arbitrary term that some liberals made up so that they can yell at Phil and call him a racist. It’s all but completely irrelevant what the black person (or Latino-instead-of-Mexican, or Asian-instead-of-Chinese) thinks; all that matters is how it affects Phil.

It’s right there in the term “politically correct.” People couldn’t possibly be saying this stuff out of actual sensitivity, or because it’s actually correct. They have to be saying it to get some kind of political power.

One of the best recent developments in video games is the list of “social justice warriors to avoid,” compiled by frightened and angry message board posters and Tumblrers who are fed up with people suggesting that games be inclusive. The reason it’s got me happy is that people who are bothered by inclusivity always use the rationalization that they’re not bigots but free-thinkers: they’re just saying the things that everyone else is thinking but are too afraid to say out loud. Forming a list of enemies is digging their own grave; as the list grows and grows, it’ll become clearer that bigotry and fear of inclusivity isn’t representative of the audience at large, but nothing more than the desperate panic of a backwards minority.

I’m unlikely to get labeled a “social justice warrior,” unfortunately, but I did once get accused of being a “white knight,” and it was glorious. In real life, we so rarely get those climax-of-Perry-Mason moments, where someone just freaks out and reveals exactly what an asshole he is. Telling a gay guy that he’s only speaking out against misogyny in an effort to get women to sleep with him is the purest expression of gross selfishness. The only reason a dude would possibly call somebody out for harassing a woman is to make himself look good. He must be as sexually frustrated and intimidated as I am. There’s no other possible explanation.

The Naughtiest Swear

So it’s been fascinating to watch as people whose entire philosophy is based on self-interest take the tactics of progressives and try to use them against progressives. It’s a lot like watching children learn to swear: They don’t understand what they’re saying, because they have no context for any of it. They just repeat the things they’ve heard before, testing again and again to see what kind of reaction they can provoke.

It’s resulted in all kinds of Bizarro World situations. For instance, all the desperately confused people treating the word “intolerance” the same way I treat the word “nonplussed:” using it to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means.

If I’m driven by self-interest, “tolerance” has nothing to do with you getting to live your life without interference, and everything to do with my getting to decide whether or not your life is acceptable. And if you take someone who doesn’t actually understand the concept of tolerance, and spend several years calling them out on their intolerance, they’ll start to believe that the word doesn’t have an actual meaning. It’s just a name you yell at people when you’re not getting your way. Shout “no” enough times and you can train a dog to stay off the couch, even if he has no idea why it’s bad for him to be on the couch in the first place.

When you see the world as a selfish struggle for power, then you’re always under attack. It’s never the case that we all win; if there’s a winner, there has to be a loser. Saying “Happy Holidays” isn’t an attempt to be inclusive of other religions or the non-religious; it’s an attack on your religion. We have to remind people that “it’s Freedom of Religion, not Freedom from Religion!” because there are atheists out there who actually believe that I’m as wrong as I know that they are! Bilingual signs aren’t an opportunity to learn a new language; they’re a threat because it implies there’s something wrong with me for only speaking English!

And in the case of marriage equality, much time has been wasted over the years trying to get opponents comfortable with the concept, by reminding them that they don’t lose anything if gay people get married. It was time wasted because in the opponents’ minds, they are losing something: the ability to say I don’t approve of this. If a homophobe has to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, his problem isn’t having to bake the cake. His problem is not getting to express his disapproval. (This isn’t even a particularly insightful observation on my part; several times, opponents of marriage equality explicitly said they wanted it to be up to a popular vote so that they could say they don’t condone it).

Which leads to last night’s ridiculous mockery of progressivism, the “CancelColbert” hashtag. It would’ve been laughably absurd if it weren’t so transparently manipulative. It’s offensive to see something so crass use the language of racial sensitivity, and it’s depressing to see how many well-meaning people took the bait.

You’d think that there’d be absolutely no doubt that it had nothing to do with actual racial sensitivity, as soon as perpetually clumsy opportunist and professional disappointment to the human race Michelle Malkin jumped on the bandwagon.

But even if that were somehow not enough, it should’ve become incontrovertibly clear after you read just a handful of the messages, not to mention the instigator’s desperate grab for attention full explanation. Count the number of times the term “white liberal” is used. The only truthful thing in that entire post is that there’s no point trying to explain satire to these people. They obviously understand satire enough to recognize that Colbert is a liberal comedian, and that’s all that matters. Finally a chance to beat the liberals at their own game!

It has everything to do with political power, and nothing to do with race, tolerance, inclusivity, or even the nature of humor.

Which is a drag, because some of those tweets would’ve been hilarious. One said “I DON’T NEED A WHITE LIBERAL MAN TO TEACH ME ABOUT SATIRE,” which is like a perfect diamond. But made of irony instead of carbon.

Always Punching Up

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of it. When a kid drops an F-bomb, you can’t just suppress a laugh and then go on about your business. You have to ask, “where did you learn that word?” And in this case, the answer is, “From you, all right? I learned it by watching you!”

It’s still tragicomic to see self-described conservatives thinking they’ve finally hit upon the right combination of words and outrage to outwit the liberal menace once and for all, only to have it fizzle once it becomes clear they don’t understand the actual concepts behind the words. But when progressives do the exact same thing, it’s not funny at all. It’s unsettling.

My go-to example is an article on Jezebel.com a couple of years ago, in which writer Lindy West tried to describe “How to Make a Rape Joke.” (Which I’m not linking to, because Gawker). Shockingly, the post was longer than just the word “Don’t.” Instead, it was a depressingly belabored attempt at a wry explanation of why Daniel Tosh is just offensive while comedians like Louis CK are actually transgressive and genuinely funny.

And again, shockingly, the answer was more involved than just “Because Tosh is a hack.” Instead, it dragged in the topic of free speech, the old claim that it’s okay to punch up but never okay to punch down, the relative horror of sexual assault vs. accidents with farming equipment, and CDC statistics on the frequency of sexual assault. As if decent human beings need to consult actuarial tables to determine whether or not something is offensive.

Few of the ideas in the article were particularly new; for as long as there’s been a “counter-culture,” there’s been the same cycle:

After the inevitable, flaccid arguments about freedom of speech and censorship, someone asks a question like: “How come it’s okay when Sarah Silverman says something racist or misogynist or anti-Semitic, but not when we do?”

Instead of giving the correct answer to that question, there’s instead a tortured explanation about the transgressive nature of comedy and positions of power and being the social underdog and okay it’s because Silverman is a Jewish woman.

But the actual correct answer is “it’s okay because Sarah Silverman is saying racist or misogynist or anti-Semitic words, but isn’t expressing racist or misogynist or anti-Semitic ideas.”

To West’s credit, she doesn’t focus on gender or race, like so many others have. (It’s always depressing when you see someone who’s progressive in so many other ways still insist that there are certain jokes and certain words that only black people are allowed to use, and some that only women are allowed to use). But her post still overwhelmingly suggests that there does exist a set of rules describing who can say what without impunity, or as she words it, “feedback.” There’s a definite structure of oppressors and oppressed, and we must scrutinize our exchanges with other people to take into account not just what’s being said but who’s saying it.

The most telling part, I think, is her defense of Louis CK. He gets a pass because he’s spent years building a library of material in which the oppressors are always the butt of the joke, never the oppressed. Which I’m assuming doesn’t include the bits in which Louis CK calls his daughters “assholes.” But wait, she covers that too: “The point is, only a fucking psychopath would think like that, and the simplicity of the joke lays that bare.” Which I’m assuming doesn’t take into account that it would more accurately be a sociopath who thinks that way and that there’s a very real problem of judging the mentally ill instead of getting them the help that they need.

Gold is Fine, Thanks

That’s not (just) me trying to one-up politically correct speech. The point is that treating it in terms of a social hierarchy is what turns it into “politically correct” instead of just being “correct.” There isn’t a complex set of rules governing how we show basic human decency to each other. The rule is simply “be inclusive and empathetic.”

The feeble idea behind Tosh’s schtick is that you’d have to be a sociopath to think the things that he says, too. And he doesn’t need to have been working in comedy for decades to be given the benefit of the doubt; “not a sociopath” should be our baseline assumption about everyone until they prove us wrong. Tosh’s material isn’t funny because he doesn’t do anything with it. It’s just one example after the next of saying the most shocking thing he can think of and then grinning at his own naughtiness. It’s not transgressive because there’s no thought behind it. It’s just words.

Take that to its most absurd extreme and you end up with the “Cancel Colbert” nonsense. The instigators hoped that we’re gullible enough to believe that the context was irrelevant. The very act of a white male uttering the unspeakable words is horribly offensive.

The motivation for that, obviously, was a cynical power play. But I see no difference between that and the way that many actual progressives treat the exchange of ideas as if it were a perpetual game of Taboo. Whenever you find yourself saying, “You’re not allowed to say…” or “Intent doesn’t matter,” that’s a sure sign that you’re doing inclusivity wrong. You’re focusing on the speaker instead of what’s being said. If you focus on social inequality instead of making the baseline assumption that we’re all equal partners in a conversation, then you’re doomed to just keep repeating the same power struggle over and over again.

A couple of years ago at a Game Developer’s Conference, a few people were pleased with themselves for coming up with “The Platinum Rule.” The idea was that it’s not good enough to treat other people as you want to be treated; it’s much better to treat other people as they want to be treated.

I was alarmed that more people didn’t instantly see how horrible an idea that was, much less that they’d promote it as a feel-good symbol of inclusivity. It’s the opposite of inclusivity. It consigns us to always see each other for our differences, instead of acknowledging that no matter what our background, we all want the same things.